With the large number of people who spend upwards of eight hours every day seated at a desk or in front of a computer screen, the health impacts and considerations of professions requiring such sedentary schedules have become an important issue. Individuals who spend their days seated in front of a desk or screen are concerned about potential health impacts such as back injury, eye fatigue, and general muscular atrophy. Employers whose employees spend their days seated are concerned about these health issues as well as the productivity of their employees.
Substantial effort has been expended to develop seating solutions that attempt to reduce the strain on peoples' bodies, thereby ideally reducing negative health impacts and increasing productivity. For example, many office chair designers have resorted to using mesh seating materials to conform to users' bodies, and have provided several adjustable components (including adjustable lumbar support members) to allow users to customize the size and shape of their chairs to their bodies. While these efforts have resulted in chairs that provide more comfort and customization, these efforts are nonetheless inadequate to provide completely customizable seating solutions.
Other efforts have focused on raised solutions designed to be “perched” on, and not as standing solutions against which a user can lean. For example, in such solutions, a user can position adjustable padded devices at an appropriate height to sit or “perch” on top of a stool-like seating portion. In this way, users can comfortably sit at a higher than standard height in front of a raised desk or computer screen, enabling legs to be more fully extended than when sitting in a standard-height office chair.
Such solutions are nonetheless also inadequate, as there are no known solutions that provide users with the choice to either stand and lean against a piece of furniture or sit as desired. These solutions are also inadequate because while the height is adjustable, the contour of the portion of the apparatus that engages the user's body is not adjustable to different uses or comfort desires.
Thus, although there have been efforts to develop customizable, comfortable workplace seating solutions, considerable shortcomings remain.